Sexuality, Health and Human Rights

Sonia Corrêa, Rosalind Petchesky, Richard Parker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134266661
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Teoría, práctica y referencia médicas

This new work surveys how rapid changes taking place at the start of the twenty-first century in social, cultural, political and economic domains impact on sexuality, health and human rights. The relationships between men, women and children are changing quickly, as are traditional family structures and gender norms. What were once viewed as private matters have become public, and an array of new social movements – transgender, intersex, sex worker, people living with HIV – have come into the open.

The book is split into three sections:

• 
  
  

• Global 'Sex' Wars – discusses the notion of sexualities, its political landscapes internationally, and the return of religious fervour and extremism

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• Epistemological Challenges and Research Agendas – examines modern 'scientific' understandings of sexuality, its history and the way in which AIDS has drawn attention to sexuality

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• The Promises and Limits of Sexual Rights – discusses human rights approaches to sexuality, their strengths and limitations and new ways of imagining erotic justice

Offering a unique framework for understanding this new world, set in the context of the major theoretical debates of recent decades, this book will be of interest to professionals, advocates and policy researchers and is suitable for a wide range of courses covering areas such as gender studies, human sexuality, public health and social policy.

Part 1
Global ‘sex’ wars

Chapter 1
Landscaping sexualities

The idea that sexuality, politics, and economics are connected is not new. In the early nineteenth century the writings and practices of Utopian socialists, such as Owen and Fourier, articulated economic justice and sexual liberation in their revolutionary principles and strategies. A few decades later Engels (1884) explored the subtle articulation between sex and economics in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, which socialist feminists like Emma Goldman and Alexandra Kollontai would later build on. At the same time the groundbreaking works of Darwin and Sigmund Freud laid the foundations for the development of a science of ‘sex’, establishing the notion of a sex drive and deeply influenced further theorizing and research. These developments also coincided with the ‘invention’ of homosexuality (see Chapter 4). A few decades later, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Central European intellectuals and activists created the SexPol Association, interweaving Marxism and psychoanalysis to advance radical propositions about sexuality, economics, and power.¹ In the late 1940s, Simone de Beauvoir’s critique of ‘anatomy as destiny’ (1953 [orig. 1949]) opened the path for conceptualizing ‘man’ and ‘woman’ not as separate biological entities but as contingent, cultural constructs. By the 1960s, the ideas emerging from SexPol reached the counterculture through the writings of Wilhelm Reich (1971, 1973b) and Herbert Marcuse (1966). Young feminists were now reading de Beauvoir and revisiting Marx, Engels, and Freud to more fully understand male control over women’s sexuality, the political dimensions of the private sphere, and the meaning of bodies as potential foundations of political entitlements (Firestone 1970, Greer 1970, Millet 1979, Mitchell 1974, Rubin 1975).

This was the moment when an epistemological shift occurred that would deeply transform thinking about ‘sex’ (see Chapter 5). In the USA, as early as 1973, Gagnon and Simon (1973) started moving away from the previous conception of ‘sex’ towards a new approach that privileged the personal and cultural meanings that a sexual act has for the actor. During 1974 to 1975, feminists in the USA further developed the concept of ‘gender’ through a critique of prevailing naturalistic assumptions about male and female subjectivities, social roles, and sexual behaviour (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974, Rubin 1975). Concurrently, sociologists such as Plummer (1975) and Gagnon and Simon (1973) argued that sexual life is embedded in social contexts and cannot be fully grasped unless other aspects of human interaction (e.g., class, labour, race, and family relations) are taken into account. A short while later, Michel Foucault (1978 [orig. 1976]) illuminated the placement of ‘sex’ as a pivot in the webs of power that pervade discourses, norms, and practices and that produce hierarchies, exclusions, and stigma in modern societies (see Chapter 5). From there, the discourses and conceptual frames that conceive ‘sex’ as an immutably natural drive would be systematically scrutinized and these novel theories would infuse new ideas into sexual politics.

Since then, as well, the world – in which sexuality and politics are constantly intersecting – has changed substantially. The political climate and geopolitical dynamics of the 1970s were determined by the overall logic of the Cold War, in which closed political regimes in the socialist world coexisted sometimes peacefully and sometimes not with a number of Western-supported (in particular, US-supported) dictatorships South, but also North, of the equator. Progressive political imagination was inspired by not only the socialist promises of equality but also by the ongoing impacts of the 1960s counterculture and its radical slogans, such as ‘Make love not war’. In 1989, when the Cold War era ended, the process of change that came to be known as globalization accelerated across all continents. The scientific and technological revolution, which had been underway for some time, infused a new rhythm to capital accumulation, rapidly reshaping the material basis of society and the means of communication among individuals, social groups, and interacting cultures. As economies around the globe have become interdependent the relationship between economy, society, and the nation state has been transformed.

In geopolitical terms, the USA achieved unprecedented economic and military hegemony, which would become particularly problematic following the election of George W. Bush to the presidency in 2000 and even more salient after the attacks in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. That infamous day made visible and influential worldwide the neo-conservative military, economic, and moral agenda that had been gaining strength in US domestic politics since the 1970s. Today the global scenario contrasts sharply with the optimistic predictions of the late 1980s that the end of the Cold War would see resources spent in warfare and for nuclear deterrence transferred to peaceful economic and human development and the deepening of democracy – the short-lived ‘peace dividend’ (UNDP 1990). While the tragedies and crimes of the 2003 Iraq war and subsequent occupation and the related militarization of geopolitics remain at the centre of the global stage, in the past decade new centres of eco-nomic power have emerged to contest US hegemony, revive nationalist agendas and popular sentiments, and produce new geopolitical skirmishes in the most diverse regions.²

When contemporary sexual politics sparked in the 1960s, political affairs were in large part contained within national boundaries, but this has changed dramatically. By 1979 Keynesian macroeconomic principles, which had emphasized the role of states in economic production and regulation, would be supplanted by the neo-liberal premises³ of the so-called Washington Consensus, calling for drastic cuts in public spending, privatization, and trade liberalization. In subsequent decades, structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) derived from these policy guidelines fundamentally reshaped national economies. The detrimental effects of these policies affected almost all countries, including those in Western Europe as well as the USA, but were especially devastating in developing countries, particularly in Africa, and in the Eastern European economies in transition (Castells 1996, 1998, Harvey 2005, Rodrik 2000, Saad-Filho and Johnston 2005, Stiglitz 2002, Stiglitz et al. 2006; see also Chapters 6 and 10).⁴

At the same time, supra-state structures in the form of regional blocks and economic alliances became more robust or were created where they did not exist before – including the European Union, Mercosur (Mercado Común del Sur/Southern Common Market), Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), Asia Pacific Economic Community (APEC), Caribbean Community (CARICOM), and the African Union (AU). These new institutional and economic structures have been gradually reconfiguring state boundaries, not only in economic terms but also with regard to normative frames. Even more important, from the mid-1980s on, the so-called ‘global governance complex’ – the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – became the focus of organized campaigns by civil society actors.

Since 1985, and with more intensity after 1990, the effects of the Washington Consensus were systematically criticized and civil society groups mounted demonstrations against the World Bank, IMF, and, later on, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Group of 7 (after 1994, the Group of 8)⁵ wherever these institutions held their high-level meetings. Concurrently, the UN adopted a deliberate strategy to encourage the engagement of civil society in policy-making processes, in particular in a series of international conferences on its development agenda, known as the UN cycle of social conferences. These included the Children’s Summit (New York, 1990), the Conference on Environment and Development (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), the World Conference on Human Rights (Vienna, 1993), the International Conference on Population and Development (Cairo, 1994), the World Summit on Social Development (Copenhagen, 1995), the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, 1995), the Second UN Conference on Human Settlements/Habitat II (Istanbul, 1996), the World Food Summit (Rome, 1997), the Millennium Summit (New York, 2000), the UN General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS (New York, 2001), and the International Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Forms of Intolerance (Durban, 2001). Each of these global events mobilized a vast and diverse gamut of civil society actors, exposed them to global policy debates and dynamics, and brought to the attention of states situations of gender and sexuality-based inequality, discrimination, and violence. During the past ten to 15 years, therefore, the main policy debates and gains in the domain of sexuality – including those related to women’s rights and HIV/AIDS – have played out in the intersections between national and global policy arenas.

Taking the 1970s as a point of reference, a key differential observed with respect to the dynamics of sexual politics is the increasing transnationalization of actors and issues, as well as greater connectivity across civil societies. Another striking distinction, however, is more sombre. In the 1960s and 1970s, sexual politics were deeply interwoven with Utopian socialist and radical ideas. In subsequent decades, a large number of Southern countries, a few European societies, and all of Eastern Europe and Central Asia experienced democratizing processes. In most Southern countries, these processes were characterized by great expectations of social justice and created openings for new political agendas, such as the struggle for gender equality, for women’s human rights, and against other forms of sexuality-based discrimination.

Today, in sharp contrast, the loss of credibility in politics is widespread, and nationalist, communitarian, and religious forces have been reactivated practically everywhere, very often using the notion of culture as immutable to gain the hearts and minds of people (Castells 1997, Freedom House 2007, UNDP 2004). Across the world, discredited political processes and the revival of authoritarian politics have been related to growing inequalities, bad management, corruption, and the increasing inability of states to respond to urgent societal needs and aspirations.⁶ The very term ‘democracy’ is now subject to ideological manipulation, with the most striking illustration being the use made of the term by US neo-conservatives to justify the invasions of Afghanistan, in 2001, and Iraq, in 2003. Concurrently, the effects of the ‘war on terror’ are infringing on civil liberties everywhere, including in long-established democracies, and restricting the activities of NGOs, particularly those engaged in the promotion and protection of human rights (AI 2007, HRW 2004c, IGLHRC and CWGL 2005).⁷

A variety of authors who have examined these trends emphasize the paradoxical features of our times (see, e.g., Appadurai 1996, Giddens 1990, 1992, 2000, Held et al. 1999, Touraine 1997, Touraine and Khos-rohavar 1999). They call attention to the primacy of markets and technoscience as the main forces behind the rapid changes the world is experiencing, underlining their negative impact on politics at large and, most particularly, on the ability of states to retain their capacity to govern. These authors also emphasize how such changes are negatively intersecting with, and deepening inequalities within and across, countries as well as class, race, ethnic, and caste divisions (Castells 1998, Guimarães 2005, Sen 1995, UNDP 2005). To a few observers, the most pervasive and perverse trait of our times is the proliferation of situations of perennial emergency, or ‘states of exception’, to which large sectors of the world population are subjected in daily life (Agamben 2005; see also Chapter 10). A state of exception implies the total abandonment of whole populations or individuals to pre-juridical conditions, expressions of societal fascism, ‘terrorism’, increased state policing, and other interventions by powerful non-state as well as state actors. States appear to have lost their capacity to provide for the well-being of their citizens, even as militarization is increased, the security apparatus strengthened, and extra-constitutional powers become pervasive.

While these analyses underline the key relevance of scientific and technological development in capital accumulation, particularly in communications, information, and biotechnology, they also place strong emphasis on the phenomenon of the ‘return of the religious’ in the form of dogmatism, fundamentalism, or extremism (Armstrong 2000, Castells 1997, de Boni 1995, Derrida and Vattimo 1998, Sen 2005). Human history has experienced many moments in which religious dogmatism drove social conflicts and contaminated state rationales, but religious extremism can no longer be portrayed as a phenomenon confined within certain communitarian, institutional, or national boundaries. Today dogmatic visions are manifest in all dominant religious traditions and, practically everywhere, politically organized religious extremists operate to influence legal norms and policies, when they are not directly engaged in taking state power through electoral politics. These forces are interconnected globally and utilize the most up-to-date communication technologies to expand their support base and exert pressure on state institutions (see, e.g., Almond et al. 2003, Girard 2004, Jelen and Wilcox 2002, Mujica 2007). This trend, which has been interpreted as a reaction to the growing uncertainties of late capitalism (see Chapter 3), poses unpredicted political and conceptual challenges with respect to the philosophical foundations and political meanings of secularity. In addition, everywhere, religious revivalism systematically targets emerging new ‘sex’ and gender orders as a strategy to re-create ‘tradition’ and to allow space for dominant heteronormativity and sexism to regain a sense of control (Imam 2000, Jung et al. 2001, Saghal and Yuval-Davis 1992, Sen and Corrêa 2000, Sow et al. 2007). Sexual and gender hierarchies – deeply rooted in ancient religious doctrines and pre-modern cultures – reappear strongly in the discourse of dogmatic religious voices.

Further complicating the global mapping that situates ‘sex’ and sexuality in our time, the surge and expansion of HIV and AIDS, from the early 1980s, began to alter individual and public perceptions about sexual identities and practices. These complex intertwined dynamics created new forms of injustice and preventable death, and at the same time illuminated the webs of power underlying the interactions among ‘sex’, social hierarchies, and sociocultural change. This enhanced the contestation and redefinition of sexual identities and norms, the emergence of new family forms, and the destabilization of traditional notions of masculinity and of patriarchy itself.

The brave new worlds of ‘sex’

One of the key features of life in the early twenty-first century is the appearance of a brave new world of sexual possibilities and choices. Riding on the waves of the information age (Castells 1996), and perhaps most visible in relation to the Internet, today’s apparent proliferation of sexual options seems to extend far beyond what might have been imaginable only a few decades ago. As writers such as Giddens (1992), Plummer (2003), and Weeks (1995) have all highlighted, this explosion of intimate possibilities appears to be one of the defining characteristics of sexual life and experience under the conditions of late modern capitalism.

These striking transformations are at play everywhere in the world. At least at the level of discourse and media representations, images of these kinds of possibilities are available across the globe. As lived alternatives, however, they imply intricate dynamics in terms of personal relations but also in regard to state actions, religious domains, and contentious state–society interactions. As part of a global cultural imaginary, they are palpable in many arenas – the press and television, music, theatre, video, cinema, and the core domain of informational society, the Internet. Although these realms of media and popular culture are too vast and complex to be fully analysed here, they cannot be entirely left aside in any effort aimed at landscaping sexualities in the twenty-first century. We saw a foreshadowing of this moment in the atmosphere of the 1960s counterculture, crystallized in the popular imagination as the era of ‘sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll’. But the scope, scale, and rhythm of what is experienced today are unprecedented, as may be seen clearly in looking at film production. Sex and gender have been a leitmotiv of film production since the invention of cinema, and a number of films produced in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s delved deeply into explorations of heterosexual desire and eroticism.⁸ Male homosexuality was portrayed in cinema from as early as the 1950s, and from the 1960s large audiences have been exposed to the gay and transgender themes and aesthetics of works by Pasolini, Fass-binder, and, more recently, Almodovar.⁹ However, during the past decade, despite a growing regressive moral climate, an outburst of mainstream Hollywood and independent productions has raised the visibility of homosexuality and transgenderism in cinema.¹⁰ At the same time, alternative ‘LGBTQ’ film festivals, as well as documentaries about sexuality in the most diverse cultures, are mushrooming worldwide.¹¹

In the past 30 years, television and radio productions, in both industrialized and developing countries, have diffused new gender and ‘sex’ norms, which have been rapidly absorbed into the popular imagination and gradually translated into everyday practices with respect to issues such as family size, women’s role, the use of contraception, and sexual liberation itself. The wildly popular soap operas produced in Brazil since the 1970s now constitute a major export item, seen in Europe, the USA, across Africa, and in parts of Asia including China (Faria and Potter 2002, Hamburger and Buarque de Holanda 2004). In the 1990s and 2000s music videos, the cable television network, Music Television, often using sexuality as a selling point, have traversed national and cultural borders capturing the imagination of young people in places as diverse as Mexico, Nepal, and Asia-Pacific, and sexual affairs are shown openly in most ‘reality shows’. The US television series Sex and the City, watched by audiences worldwide, offers a fine ethnography of the transformations underway in the realm of heterosexuality and female sexuality in Westernized urban areas.¹² More recently, The L Word, portraying the daily lives of a group of Californian lesbians, started to soak up audiences previously addicted to Sex and the City. In addition, the series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which makes cultural jokes about the lack of taste and good manners on the part of heterosexual men, attracted huge audiences in the USA...